The Pseudo-Lesbians Are Back

I’d rejected the Sochi Olympics invitation, figured it was the right protest. But then I found out t.A.T.u. was performing there exclusively, and suddenly I was reconsidering. Jelena Katina and Julija Wolkowa—the Russian duo that made All the Things She Said feel essential in 2002. They were marketed as pseudo-lesbians, technically, though that was the entire appeal. I was massively into them. Still am, honestly. Once you’re committed to t.A.T.u., that’s just your lane.

What actually gets me is the perfect, unbearable contradiction of it. Russia’s constructed this entire political edifice around crushing homosexuality—laws, violence, systematic erasure—and meanwhile they’re hosting an Olympic performance by two girls whose entire career is built on kissing each other. It’s so perfectly stupid, so perfectly tone-deaf. Putin gets to be simultaneously brutal and completely blind to the joke he’s creating. There’s a kind of commitment to that contradiction that you have to respect, if only in the sense that you’re watching someone walk directly into their own irony without stopping.